Politics of the Day - Why I <3 LaShawn Barber
Guys, I try and not get political on Bubblegen. So please excuse the politics if you're not into that kind of thing. That said...
I admit it. I read LaShawn Barber's blog. It's a guilty pleasure, full of schadenfreude - like watching a train wreck that never ends.
I luv LaShawn because she is the ultrapundit - more pundit than pundit. She's the ultimate simulation - she demonstrates what the pundit really is; a simulation of argument, rhetoric, knowledge, denuded of all context, logic, data, and rationale.
Her arguments aren't
just asinine, as pundit's arguments often are - they actually take to the limit, as far as one can possibly can take, the fundamental paradox that dominates American culture today: demonstrating a superior lack of understanding about, well, almost anything - jurisprudence, politics, economics, ethics, religion, you name it - gets you attention.
LaShawn usually demonstrates
no understanding (of anything).
The banality of stupidity, it turns out, is a real winner.
Call it the Village Idiot Effect - As we converge to a global village, it takes a singular devotion to battling the vast amounts of knowledge that even Google can give you for free to
keep being the village idiot; but those that succeed enjoy a larger share of global attention.
The market for idiots, it turns out, is also, like other markets in a globalizing economy, a winner-take-all market.
Now, I'm not harshing on LaShawn for no reason. Here's the latest addition to her unrivalled arsenal of mind-blowingly brain-crushing fatuousity:
"...Gratuitous comment: People are ragging on Ann Coulter for using the term �raghead.� I think it�s much ado about nothing. How is that, Sean?"
Let me get this straight - LaShawn Barber (as if the sheer Voltron-of-stupid power displayed on her blog wasn't enough
already) also hints at being...a racist.
I am in awe - utterly in awe - of the sheer unvarnished perversion of this contradiction. LaShawn is a black (born-again?) fundamentalist Christian. One would think (wrongly) that this might make it rather unlikely for her to want to be a racist.
That, my friends, is perfection - it's the perfection of ultrapunditry; to be able to claim everything while
understanding nothing - not even the rawest essence of the deepest core of your own history and morality.
It's a true coup de grace. I don't think either Cleese or Orwell could have designed this story to turn out any better.